Cradling his baby daughter, Saeed Masri took flight Friday from renewed Israeli bombardment of Gaza with little faith that even a UN facility can protect his family.

Three hours after a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas ended, a missile hit the roof of a building opposite the apartment in Jabaliya where he was staying with relatives after his own neighbourhood was shelled.

"We were in Beit Hanoun and were there during the war and the shelling, so after that I came to stay here with my cousins," Masri said as he trudged down the street with his family in tow.

It was only a small rocket fired by a drone, intended as a warning for civilians to leave, residents said.

It shattered the roof of the building and left no casualties, but an ambulance was parked around the corner in case it was followed by more attacks.

Masri heeded the message immediately, packing some food into plastic bags, gathering his wife and five children and setting off down the street to find safety.

His eyes darted as he spoke, looking back at the building just hit by the strike, his daughter silent in his arms and with the four other children milling around his legs.

He planned to take shelter in a UN-run school to keep his family safe, but he had little hope it would guarantee protection.

"The schools aren't safe either, they hit the schools," he said.

At least 153 schools in Gaza, including 90 run by the UN, have been damaged by Israeli air strikes or shelling during the conflict, the UN children's fund UNICEF says.

Three deadly strikes on UN schools in the Gaza Strip since Israel launched its assault on the territory on July 8 stirred international fury.

"Why is the whole world sleeping, why?" asked Masri quietly. "Children and women are being targeted, and the world is sleeping."

Still scared

As talks in Cairo aimed at reaching a lasting truce failed to achieve concrete results, Palestinian militants fired two rockets at southern Israel before the 72-hour ceasefire ended early Friday.

Dozens more rocket attacks followed.

Israel retaliated, saying it was targeting "terror sites" in the coastal enclave where Hamas is the de facto ruler.

Palestinian emergency services said one of the strikes killed a 10-year-old boy.

The rocket fire prompted Palestinians who had gone home during the ceasefire to return to the hospitals and schools to which some 200,000 people had fled to before the three-day reprieve.

In Beit Hanoun, a steady stream of families trudged along the road to a school.

Others riding donkey carts and cars packed with mattresses and clothes rattled past, just half an hour after the ceasefire ended.

Um Abdullah, 50, who did not give her real name, said she was reluctantly returning to the school in which she and her family had sheltered.

"We were waiting for a second truce, but it did not come," she sighed.

"We waited until the last minute, until 8:00 am, but it did not come."

She had only been able to pack a small bag of clothes and another with some flat bread and tomatoes before fleeing again.

She would now stay in the school until a lasting truce was reached.

In the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City, families trickled back to another UN-run school after receiving news of the failed truce.

Hundreds of refugees from some of the worst-damaged areas have sheltered in the classrooms overlooking a central courtyard.

Laundry was hanging from the rooms overlooking the courtyard, where there was a strong smell of sweat and waste.

In the courtyard, Abdullah Abdullah, 33, had just arrived back after spending the truce at home.

Like Masri, Abdullah was worried for his wife and children.

"I'm afraid because the schools were targeted, because young people died, women and children," he said.

"We're all scared, I'm scared, my children are scared, my wife is scared."

The head of the Palestinian negotiations team in Cairo Azzam al-Ahmad
said Friday that the delegation will not leave Cairo until a final
agreement is reached.

Al-Ahmad said after meeting the
Palestinian delegation that "we are not with the escalation and we are
willing to continue negotiations through our Egyptian brothers to
achieve a final agreement that returns our rights."

He described
this as meaning "lifting the siege on Gaza in all its forms and
providing the children of Gaza an opportunity to live in dignity."

Al-Ahmad
hoped the coming hours would be conclusive and not wasted like previous
days, and he added that Palestinian demands are obvious and cannot be
given up, referring to the seaport and airport.

He also said
that Palestinians aren’t demanding anything new, because an airport and a
seaport were previously agreed upon in the Oslo Accords.

Al-Ahmad
explained that during the week’s stay in Gaza they did not hear the
Israeli opinion on their demands, and only know what was published in
the media.

Limited skirmishes or a new round of killing? Friday's resumption of hostilities may see Hamas overplay its hand in a dangerous poker game that could plunge Gaza back into chaos, analysts said.

Palestinian militants fired two rockets at Israel in the final hours of a 72-hour truce and followed it up with dozens more as Israel hit back with unrelenting airstrikes.

At least 1,898 Palestinians have been now killed, including around 450 children, thousands of homes have been reduced to rubble and around a quarter of the 1.8 million people in Gaza displaced.

Israel endured its worst military losses -- 64 soldiers -- since its 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon -- and three civilians -- one of them a Thai agricultural worker -- were killed on the home front.

Indirect talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, whose delegation includes Hamas, have stretched for days in Cairo but Egyptian mediators have struggled to reconcile conflicting demands.

Hamas wants Israel to lift the blockade it imposed on Gaza in 2006 before it will stop rocket attacks. Israel has conditioned reconstruction on the demilitarisation of Gaza.

Easing the blockade

Hamas sees lifting the blockade, which Egypt has also partially imposed with the closure of the Rafah border crossing, as the minimum it can take home to a war-battered Gaza Strip.

"Clearly they are not going to get it. Question is how much easing will they get?" says Nathan Thrall, from the International Crisis Group.

The armed wing of Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, has insisted on a sea port and the building of an international airport in Gaza.

Israel will not countenance it.

"Any boat would be able to enter without being checked and Israel will never accept that," warned Thrall, pointing out that a port would simply give Hamas a new means to smuggle in rockets.

Naji Charab, a political affairs expert at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, says Hamas is looking for some kind of compromise that would give it "an honorable exit."

The Islamist movement may have inflicted greater losses on Israel in the battlefield than it expected to, but it has been forced into a corner and lost an ally in Egypt.

The overthrow of president Mohamed Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood movement is close to Hamas, has seen Cairo lash out hard against Hamas, destroying its tunnels on the Egyptian side of the border and freezing out the movement.

Kobi Michael, a political scientist at Ariel University in the occupied West Bank, said Israel's most important alliance in the Middle East had become Cairo.

"Egypt has no problem seeing Gazans buckle under the burden," he told AFP.

"In that aspect, Israel might have even disappointed Egypt a bit for not doing to Hamas what Egypt would have done to them if it were up to them," he added.

Ground offensive?

Its battlefield achievements have given Hamas at least a temporary boost in popularity in Gaza, but it is under huge pressure to prove to people at home that the massive Palestinian losses were worth something.

Former Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said that Hamas wanted to see how Israel will respond.

For the moment Israel has hit back only with airstrikes. It recalled all ground troops from Gaza earlier this week and there is no imminent sign of tanks rolling back across the border.

"If they want to stop the rocket fire you have to go with ground forces, you have to occupy the Gaza Strip. But nobody has said that," she said.

"Israel did not want to go in, to conquer Gaza, to progress too deep," said Yoram Schweitzer, a former counter-terrorism chief in the Israeli military.

But if the conflict gets bogged down and the sides can't reach an acceptable agreement, "Israel would have to decide if it changes its policy and enters Gaza for a wider operation," he said.

Books and papers lay strewn across the ground after Israeli forces bombed the Islamic University of Gaza overnight on August 2, 2014 in Gaza CityBy Al-ShabakaAl-Shabaka is an independent non-profit organization whose mission is to educate and foster public debate on Palestinian human rights and self-determination within the framework of international law.

This policy brief is authored by Aimee Shalan and Samer Abdelnour. Aimee Shalan is the director of the Friends of Birzeit University, a UK-based charity that supports the right to education and its role in the wider development of Palestinian society, and Samer Abdelnour is an assistant professor at the Rotterdam School of Management.

All eyes are on the terrible toll of dead and injured and the extensive destruction -- as well as the dire humanitarian situation of the population under siege in Gaza.

But less attention is being paid to the longer-term damage caused by the current Israeli crackdown throughout the occupied Palestinian Territory that is having far-reaching and detrimental consequences for the development of Palestinian society as a whole.

Israeli attacks on Palestinian universities and other educational institutions are a case in point. They have greatly increased since the military crackdown began in June. The already scant and biased Western media coverage of this crackdown, however, has meant that these attacks, which have also targeted students and faculty, have gone largely unreported with little effort to hold Israel accountable for its violations of Palestinians' right to education.

The Palestinian Education Ministry condemned Israel's repeated bombing of educational institutions after 10 schools sustained damage during air raids on Gaza in June. Weeks later, the United Nations reported 90 schools[PDF] damaged and in need of repairs due to the bombardment. A technical college was also one of the many civilian institutions targeted in Gaza by the Israeli military, despite international appeals for a cease-fire.

By the end of July over 95 schools in Gaza were being used as shelters for the nearly 190,000 of 215,000 people that had been displaced from their homes. The UN also reported that at least 194,000 children were in need of direct, specialized psychosocial support because their families had experienced death, injury, or the loss of their home over the past four weeks.

The trauma of Israel's current offensive on so many young lives in Gaza will continue long after any cease-fire and is likely to have a severe impact on their education.

While some may argue that the wider repercussions of Israel's actions are not intentional, education is by no means an incidental casualty of Israeli policies and practices. In a single week earlier this summer, the Israeli army raided the campuses of five institutions of higher education, including Birzeit University near Ramallah, the Arab American University in Jenin, Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, and the Polytechnic University of Palestine in Hebron.

The Israeli army also raided and subsequently used the Palestine Ahliya University as a holding ground for detainees arrested during a separate raid of Duheisha Refugee Camp near Bethlehem. In the course of these raids, heavily armed Israeli soldiers attacked and arrested students, detained university guards, destroyed university property and equipment, and confiscated student organization materials.

These blatant attacks and abuses are the most recent manifestation of what has been an ongoing Israeli policy to target and repress Palestinian education under the country's military occupation. Israeli restrictions on freedom of movement have for decades seriously hindered the ability of students to attend their schools and universities as have repeated closures of educational institutions.

At the same time, Israeli authorities also deny entry to visiting professors interested in teaching in the oPt. Teachers, students, and other personnel in the West Bank regularly report harassment, intimidation, and violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers and soldiers.

Willing partners of this sustained assault have been no other than Israeli educational institutions themselves, through indisputable linkages with the Israeli military and the silence or even proactive collusion of Israeli academia. To give but one example, Tel Aviv University, which is built on the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Shaykh Muwannis, is heavily involved with the advancement of Israeli military technology[PDF]and tactics, as well as projects that enable the continued dispossession and displacement of Palestinians.

Attacks on universities are often justified through their depiction as hotbeds for inciting hostility against Israel and as spaces for creating a culture of hate. This belief, which undergirds Israeli policy, is not only discriminatory; it is inaccurate and misguided. Palestinian universities have since their foundation been spaces for political expression, organization, and debate, precisely what a future Palestinian state needs to foster the development of its leaders in diverse spheres.The Consequences of Criminalizing the Pursuit of Education

Israel's conceptualization of universities as locations of resistance was the logic behind the closure of all Palestinian higher education institutions for almost five years during the 1st Intifada, between 1988 and 1992. During that time, students and lecturers were not allowed to attend classes, browse libraries, or work in labs.

Palestinian teachers refused to accept this criminalization of education and continued to hold "underground" classes in homes, offices, community centers, mosques, and churches. As a result, many of them were arrested simply for their pursuit of education.

Arrests for the pursuit of education have continued to the present day. Hundreds of university students have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment in recent years, while Palestinian academics have also continued to be detained without justification, as detailed in a 2014 report from the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack.

The report highlighted the case of a 20-year-old university student from Tulkarem who was detained based on the claim that his graduate research project to construct a pilotless plane posed a threat to Israel’s national security. It seems that innovation and intelligence cannot be countenanced if they are Palestinian.

In the wake of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in 2009 in Gaza, the GCPEA report also noted that the Israeli military had damaged during the course of its bombings 280 out of 641 schools and destroyed a further 18. In the same operation, 14 of the 15 higher education institutions were damaged, with six targeted directly.

The Palestinian right to education is also systematically restricted for Palestinians in detention. It is estimated that 8,000 Palestinian school children have been detained since 2000. Not only do they have limited access to education in prison, but they are also traumatized by the abuses they undergo during imprisonment.

Furthermore, when their access to education is not denied due to "security considerations," Palestinian children are told what classes they can take – including mathematics, Arabic, and world history -- and what classes they cannot take, such as economics, current events, and the sciences.

The long-term effects of these accumulated violations are manifold. Academic achievement at school level has plummeted[PDF] in recent years due to the persistent insecurity and hardship caused by Israel’s protracted occupation and military attacks. The increasing isolation of Palestinian universities, due to movement restrictions, is also having a detrimental impact on the development of Palestinian higher education as a whole. And this, in turn, is leading to "brain drain," especially at the post-graduate level, as those students who are financially able to do so opt to study abroad.

Reaffirming the Right to Education

Though rarely top of the list when populations are being terrorized, the protection of Palestinian educational institutions during these times in particular should not be forgotten. It is essential that violence directed against them and those they serve be highlighted as an explicit attack against intellectual freedom as well as against the development of the Palestinian capacity for self-determination. Such attacks seek to punish the very youth who will inherit the struggle to ensure the survival of Palestinian institutions, society, and culture.

The Right to Education Campaign offers a ready partner for action to uphold this basic human right, as does the Palestinian Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel. Both have positioned themselves to act in support of Palestinian education, students, and educators by raising awareness, facilitating partnerships, and helping to pressure Israel to adhere to its legal obligations to end attacks on civilian infrastructure and to allow unimpeded access for all Palestinians to their educational institutions.

The resilience of universities under such conditions is testament to the importance of education as an avenue of hope that embodies the future aspirations of the Palestinian people. Attacks against Palestinian education must not be allowed to continue with impunity, and access to spaces of free thought and learning must be guaranteed. If an end to the occupation is to ever be realized, educational institutions must be treated as the sanctuaries of thought and learning that they are.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health has reported that Israeli missiles and shells in the Gaza Strip have killed five Palestinians, Friday, while at least 31 have been injured.3:15 Friday Update:

In a phone call with journalist Mohamed Omer in Rafah, the IMEMC learnt that the army is bombing different areas in Rafah, and the Gaza Strip, and that the soldiers are using weapons that produce a very bad smell, and their effects cause burns on skin.

Omer told the IMEMC: “the situation is very difficult, and the army is using a weapon that burns skin on contact’“The shelling is very close to where I am”, he added, ‘They [Israel] cut off the electricity, the Internet’—- —- —- —-Israeli drones fired missiles into the area of al-Qarara, in Khan Younis, located in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, where three family members were killed and at least six others were wounded. The slain Palestinians have been identified as:

Mahmoud Khaled Abu Haddaf, 15, Khan Younis.

Suleiman Samir Abu Haddaf, 21, Khan Younis.

Mahmoud Mohamad Abu Haddaf, 9, Khan Younis.

Another Palestinian was killed, and many were injured, some seriously, when the army fired missiles into Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.

The wounded have been moved to Abu Yousef an-Najjar Hospital. The slain Palestinian has been identified as:4. Ahmad Na’im ‘Okal, 22, Rafah.

Medical sources said several Palestinians have been injured in an Israeli military bombardment of the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City.

The Israeli army carried out dozens of air strikes targeting different parts of the Gaza Strip, on Friday night, including at least 25 air strikes and shelling from warships targeting Rafah, journalist Mohammed Omer stated on his twitter account.

The first Palestinian to be killed after Israel resumed its bombardment of Gaza, earlier on Friday, was a child identified as:5. Ibrahim Zoheir ad-Dawawsa, 10, Northern Gaza